Package: ttf-bitstream-vera Version: 1.10-3 Severity: normal
The fonts in this package are missing the U+2010 HYPHEN character. This is not normally visible as one mostly encounters the ASCII minus-or-hyphen character, which looks identical. However, in a UTF-8 locale, man (for some reason) sometimes produces unicode hyphens. As a result, using Bitstream Sans Mono Bold as a terminal font produces ugly "unknown character" boxes in (some) man pages.
To replicate this problem, set your terminal font to "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono Bold" (in Konsole, for definiteness), set your locale to a UTF-8 locale (as below) and then run "man fc-cache". The hyphen in "fc-cache" will become a U+2010, which will look like a box.
Alternatively, if python is installed, set up the terminal as above and run
$ python Python 2.3.4 (#2, Jan 5 2005, 08:24:51) [GCC 3.3.5 (Debian 1:3.3.5-5)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> print u"\u2010" â >>>
The character above (in this message) is actually a U+2010, so you could also try viewing this message in a Bitstream Vera Sans family font. Be warned that mozilla-firefox helpfully borrows characters from other fonts to cope.
To fix this, all that is needed is to add a single character to the font; the character U+2010 simply needs to be made a duplicate of the ASCII minus-or-hyphen. I have done this on my home copies and it resolves the problem, but the license on this package seems to preclude distributing the fixed version under the current name. So upstream needs to fix this (which should be easy).
Thanks, Andrew
-- Package-specific info:
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Description
+++-==========================-==========================-====================================================================
ii libfreetype6 2.1.7-2.3 FreeType 2 font engine, shared library files
ii libxft2 2.1.2-6 FreeType-based font drawing library for X
ii fontconfig 2.2.3-4 generic font configuration library
-- System Information: Debian Release: 3.1 APT prefers testing APT policy: (500, 'testing') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.10.050126 Locale: LANG=en_CA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_CA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Versions of packages ttf-bitstream-vera depends on:
ii defoma 0.11.8-0.1 Debian Font Manager -- automatic f
-- no debconf information
